Whirled, Worn, Won

From the opulent halls of the East come the embassadors
to the Oval Throne of President Charlegmagne
--surely far across the horizons where only a cloud
and a steeple meet your eye here is not the world's end
but a land like ours, its mirror-image, trees warped,
slightly stunted, domes circled by vines and stars,
spices in rice and in noodles instead of our bread and potatoes--

(Whatever word came to your mind possibly
inspired by the sudden illumination through a cartoon map
or legend from a returning friend
that you had thought nonsense was probably correct,
as you sit here transcribing the unrolling
scroll of an idea that may or may not exist,
between bathroom breaks.)

--Bizarro! in a heavenwide twinkling they come. Although this is not
an original thoughbt (you think) I say take what you can get.
The barges have been working hard at getting to you what the birds
have had a long time already, though too many of them these days
you find scoffing at circuitry and pages from the telephone book,
you'd think they'd adapt faster, whatever works to warm the eggs,
after all. It has been said

that in the days predating the Crusades an idiot-servant ("idiot"
meaning "private person") chanced on (what can only now be referred to
as) the whereabouts of a legendary Persian bird in the middle of a
forest in Germany, and made sure to take a picture of it to show the folks
back at the village, but that he was soon after, camera and all, swept away
by the river (he had so successfully forded by rock-hopping and branch-grabbing across just twenty minutes previous).

His story survives in the memory and language
of certain birds, both of which are fast being
forgotten by all of us here
who have become preoccupied with catalogs and recipes for pies.
Not to mention one or two page snapshots of our indentured
dedication. But what is to be done? The Abyssinian
maid is satisfied with her Safeway wages,

vacation and sick days, and anyway the zoo is open almost
every day of the year (just don't tell her about the elephants,
how they treat the elephants; you literal-minded fool!
why don't you weave a tale since you can say of a boat on a river,
gently down the stream, like Lewis Carroll). As the trucks
pass, only half-serious, it seems, laden with the fruit of distant
places, through the window, why shouldn't the Archduke

be rounding that corner by the Stadium (Jackie O. had better
luck) and royalty not only preserved in Mother City Museum
of Art? Surely down there in Washington, too, they are wearing
but the streamlined suits of a Chambermaid -- er, Chamberlain --
or a Churchell -- um, hill, if you will -- or a Tallyrind -- hello?!
Well you know what I mean, anyway. Indeed? Yes, surely there
is a chain of becoming -- howevermany gaps from instantiation

to instantiation as you please, long as somewhere across
the empty plains x meets y at some point -- whereby the tree and mountain
on the east hand comes to be the same as the tree and mountain on the west hand. Here in --
Ah, mer! It calls -- in here we are still trying to repress the river
but sure do love the photo-ops. What are you in for? Possession
of cake: tried to eat it. At the same time? At the same time. Well, that's
like trying to be and to know simultaneously. Or like trying to follow

your eyes following your eyes in the bathroom mirror. Rather silly, isn't it?
All too well, I know. "All too well," you say. Thank God for that, I mean that there is always a surplus. You could even go weeks with no more than a clamshell you found
among bottles and other brickabrack and shorewrack down by the rotting pier,
and a stone of bread from the wellkempt circuitboard by Central Park, even then
you've a superabundance of thoughts, too bad we live in the age of "Me-Can-I-Call?"
reprogrammed (paperjammed --flump! ugh! -- there we go) diction that everyone's

afraid of going all French Revolution style again because if you don't make
a fuss you can get a carriage with a crest all your own (don't even have to go
on the Wheel of Fortune to try your luck n get it... you should know by now
that if you work hard in the right places
you can watch it from your own living room) -- shining with
storebought affirmation -- just show that you are supremely sane and
well-qualified when they call you in, that you are not dreaming of the very tropical

ideograms they are holding subliminally before your noses. Taunting. Ah
but you know more of that world than they, after all, though they
are the keeps and administrators of its drawers and mouths and copy machines,
paper-shredders, who feel perhaps that because everynight they get to go home
and taste more of the milky and honeyed joys they are sure they have
sacrificed -- "rightfully so!" -- even their own prettymuch polymorphous
personalities to secure. A child of no more

than eleven years old, how swift, how supple, his fingers on the joystick. See
the absolute faith in the flaming sword wielded ancestrally on the screen
in a green and black field. Is it really true he has fed and drank
of the joys you, his lawyer-priest-employer, his doctor, Bill Harford,
freshly returned from lastnight's wormhole for normal day's work,
are convinced -- that you have not forgotten but -- never existed
in the first place!? Okay, so he is not full, is not drunk, on that Platonic

paradise, that is a reasonable (and not unseasonable) argument. Your wife
at her mental shuttle-loom thinks it's no more than evolution as usual, everything
going along as planned. That would be fine -- "would be," indeed --except you
could have sworn you heard your grandfather say something, in the days
you looked at him and saw an ancient father, in the days he looked at you and saw
a modern child -- about the great shame about the Great War. If only you had been
paying attention! rather than slurping at your LIFE magazine kicking your feet

to the beat of the sunshine pouring through the dentist office window. The word
"Elizabeth" comes to mind. You see an old dusty hall. A voice, you hear,
as if long after it's spoken, echoing down past
the silverframed photographs. You imagine you hear an underground River.
This is not a cave. It is not a cottage either. Someone has hidden away
the most important documents, and that pasha is laughing his head off.

Turn of the century, just after the Opium Wars. Boats pass in the sun. People are wired
on letters and coffee from faroff routes. Play bridge and snooker,
attend balls and suppers. Forget their lowly status or flaunt it with riches.
All as usual, and as it should be, most say. The moon is still that imaginary
landscape beaming down, its dustfields like unrepentant patterns of what
otherwise perfectly well-behaved and motherly ladies either mourn to
or refuse to admit that they cannot make heads or tails of.

People still feel they understand the sun. Indeed, they are not wrong.
Walk upon sidewalks or down country lanes over the dandelions
and wildflowers. Their Silk Road horses sneezing and guffawing along
the way. Still somewhere in there they have not forgotten, you can sense it.
So there is nothing to worry about? Silly apprentice of an idiot shoemaker --
very well, that is me -- can you not read the fields on the admittedly finely
made plastic vessel of StonyBrook Farms butter in the completely

non-rhetorical light of where in days past she would have been tucked away
neatly behind a fence arms-a-churnin'? Yes. Does it mean a thing to ya?
No. Point in case. (Though theoretical physics shows an elephant can hang
off the side of a cliff with it's tail tied to a daisy.) Us middle-classers see all,
see? Not that anyone believes anything anymore. Part of the problem, eh, Pops?
Part? Is there a Blackberry clogging your corpus callosum? All. We are taught
from an early age to believe anything and then nothing. Which amounts

to the same thing. Office park nursery homes. Still, I don't feel it's all of the problem.
Well, look at that, you are growing up before my very own rheumy eyes. I should
be careful not to turn my back, I've heard some stories,
I might get axed and you'd get all my customers!
I dareday here comes one now;
I can hear those faulty soles on the street.
God curse him! Even horses have it better.

***

Under the protection of Sigismund I the Old,
Białowieża still wasn't anything: still a virgin forest, mostly,
with one lordly manor for the hunting nobles, and a few
scattered settlements of nomads. Then iron and tar
sprouted some villages, and later, Alexander hired some folks to be
the first forest rangers. Then after November, it didn't exist.
Then the Germans came along, with a mill and railroad,

and later a village began from a National Park. In the Second
War Göring envisioned a massive revival of upperclass game,
but the Wehrmacht made a mess of the hunting lodge: destroyed
it during their retreat. There's history's great powers for you, like
children still in their early unconsciousness, after which parents
trail as clean-up crew, for the chaos of disrupted alphabet blocks...